Renaissance

What else is there to live for but this? Breaking boundaries, creating art, sharing ideas-love-bodies-vices. Exploding through the self made ceiling of what I thought I was capable of. Refusing to limit myself and let fear of rejection keep me from expressing what I believe to be the very nature of truth and purpose to the life I’m blessed to be living now.

Relapse

I committed emotional suicide that night. All night. Overdosing on the most potent drug ever taken. Two months of withdrawls and rehab just to end back at Step One. Square One. One moment of weakness lead to hours of relapse.

And now what? The bruises are starting to show. The slightest graze of my collar bone and the imprint of your hand leaps to the surface, aching and throbbing with a dull burn that is the only validation of what I would have considered a dream.

Living in such a way for weeks as to avoid pain if possible- now I’m terrified for when these hurts will fade. Every few moments reaching up to my neck, touching the marks as if they were salvation, not what they are in fact – the very damnation to a hell of my own contrivance.
For now I welcome the pain. It makes each blurred memory clear again, and for two seconds I’m there – your hands around my neck – your lips on my spine – our fevered skin slick with the effort we’re both exerting to escape this reality with the heroin of loveless fucking.
Engaging in an act so blasphemous to the nature of friendship that we have to be seven hours, eight drinks deep to even consider it. Both of us hesitating moments before the necessary sequence is set into being that will lead to me lying here, writing this shit just to cope with my own inability to get over it.

And as the poison courses through our systems, exiting our bodies, bearing testament on your damp sheets there is a pause. Coming down is painful, reality is cruel, and your eyes are not a gentle landing. There is a silent acknowledgment of what is happening and how it changes nothing. And so I spin circles in my head and twist your sheets into knots as I drift off to sleep. Your arms around me a false show of what is profoundly absent and how any attempt at escaping this relapse is futile. So I stay.

Blue Moon Advances

The difference between who I am and who I used to be cannot be learned in one conversation over a sunset orange beer. Knowing that I am the consistent fallback of a twenty something, mid level management accountant who spends his days praying for the paycheck that will catapult him into a one bedroom luxury loft over looking the Pearl is the last thing I needed at the end of this day. Laughing over what used to be, and feeling awkward as our first kiss explaining what my current reality is could not be more uncomfortable. Please, god, yes, take your exit of this bar and this conversation and call the girl you should have in the first place. You know – the one I used to be – the sure thing – and fuck her until she feels better about herself and you feel like half the man you’ll never be. Who would have guessed your shallowness ran so deep.

Subterranean

The hope is tangible in flame flicker dark rooms, an entire movement conceived below ground – brought together by passion- filled pilgrims for the love of beauty and the love of expression – the building blocks of art. We stumble over words in ecstasy, infant ideas and realizations bursting out at the speed of certainty. Nothing born of so much heart can possibly fail. His dream is contagious, spreading from stranger to friend, infecting their hearts and minds and voices to join together and act as one with other artists to create a reality unknown until now. A reality based on the sharing of humanity, emotion, mind, body, and soul. Celebrating the beautiful and ugly, knowing one is impossible without the other. There will be love and revolution and an expansion of our consciousness; we will not take no for an answer. The roar created by our collective plea for a return to emotion will be immutable – the crash of waves on the shores outside our fair city adding a symphony behind this new beat, the back drop for our generation. There is no time like this to be here, cross legged on couches, planning out the course of change like generals before a battle – waging peace not war and art not hate. Thankful for whatever brought us together and fearful of nothing tearing it apart. Our ideas are beautiful and binding. Just wait.